Literature upholds that Information Technology (IT), when adequately combined with other in-house resources, may result in characteristics that are hard for the competition to copy. However, this is not so easy to achieve. Some emblematic unsuccessful cases involving companies with extensive experience in applying the best techniques in implementing business IT solutions have encouraged us to take a deeper look regarding the mechanisms used to generate value for businesses. In this article, we reveal the results of a variety of case studies, where competent organizations adopted IT solutions, to understand the value said adoption represents and discuss some hypothesis why some organizations had better results than others. Our analysis indicates that effectiveness achieved through the use of IT is indeed related to managements' ability to identify previous economic inefficiencies in the business model and mitigate such inefficiencies by implementing IT solutions, which is not achievable through investment analysis techniques currently employed.
IT investment effectiveness; IT investment decisions; IT value-added; Limited rationality; MATIF
